Chimp playing with plastic bottles

---

This past weekend we went to the zoo. It was a great experience!
The zoo is mainly well kept with lots of gardens and ponds. It surprised me, though that some animals had large living spaces and other tiny cages... Some seemed happy, other looked sad and lonely.

Anyways, we learned a lot. We learned that there are more than 500 species of gold fish in China (some pics of the weird ones) could see at least 25 species there. We learned about several monkey species that are only found in China, we saw lots of girafes, hippos, tiger, a chinese tiger, a panda and even a gorila!.

What really made us sad was seeing how so many Chinese were either throwing stuff at the animals like water, plastic bottles, plastic bags, feeding them or bothering them in general. It was not that they did not know; there were many signs saying "Please do not feed the animals" and we even saw some zoo volunteers telling them not to do that but apparently these guys did not mind.

Of course with my temperament, I could not stay quiet and told a girl in my broken chinese not to give a sort of sausage to a monkey after 2 people had told her the same thing.

When I asked my Chinese teacher why the people do that; she said that because young people have no control over their lives or what they can say or do (i.e. live with their parents until they marry and boyfriends/girlfriends are usually not allowed inside the homes, have limited job opportunities, can not travel overseas unless they have lost of money, can not decide how to dress -if they belong to a conservative family- can not say what they want, etc) they abuse whatever they happen to have control over. It sounds like a pretty deep reflexion and on one hand it makes sense... considering that appreciation for animals, plants and the environment in general is apparently not taught in schools so the value of having a endangered Chinese tiger in front of them is practically non-existent (there are less than 1500 Chinese tigers in the world). On the other hand, coming from Peru, a third world country that shares most of the same limitants the Chinese people have (no money, limited job opportunities, conservative families, etc) I have to say I never saw people throwing plastic bottles at animals in the zoo....


Some pics about a baby chimpance playing with the plastic bottles that the people threw at him. Isn't this the sadest thing?

---

Comments

[anonymous]

Tristeza
Cualquier animal que vive en un zoológico, en un circo o en una jaula es triste. No existe la felicidad tras los barrotes. Un abrazo. Ricardo - Raez